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Kamiya Presents Lecture at Cornell

Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures Masaaki Kamiya recently gave an invited talk, “Japanese children's interpretation of numerals; pragmatically derived vs. lexical ones,” at the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University.

Numerals can be construed as 'at least N', 'at most N' and 'exactly N' depending on the context where it appears. Kamiya discussed how Japanese 5- and 6 year-olds interpret numerals. What was discovered is that Japanese children know the lexical counterparts of 'at least' and 'at most', but they do not know the pragmatically derived ones unlike English-speaking children. Kamiya and his collaborator, Akemi Matsuya of Takachiho University, concluded that lexical words and pragmatically derived ones are mutually exclusive with respect to language acquisition.